Tag: Security

Someone has put up a post on imgur claiming to demonstrate unlocking a Galaxy S10 by 3d printing a fingerprint based on an image of the fingerprint,

First I simply took a photograph of my fingerprint on the side of a wine glass. I used my smartphone to take this picture, but it’s certainly not out of the question to use a long focal length DSLR camera to snag a fingerprint image from across a room…or further.

I then pulled the image into Photoshop and increased the contrast, and created an alpha mask.

I exported that over to 3ds Max and created a geometry displacement from the Photoshop image which gave me a raised 3d model of every last detail of the fingerprint.

I popped that model into the 3D printing software and began to print it. This was printed using an AnyCubic Photon LCD resin printer, which is accurate down to about 10 microns (in Z height, 45 microns in x/y), which is more than enough detail to capture all of the ridges in a fingerprint.

As the author of the post notes, if a smartphone is stolen, it is likely that a fingerprint of the owner will be found on the phone itself (especially if the user is repeatedly touching a specific area of the screen to unlock it, as someone using the ultrasonic fingerprint reader would be doing).

Why the f— is ESPN still not using TLS in 2019? This is extremely irresponsible behavior from a company owned by one of the largest media companies in the world (Disney). There are zero excuses for putting its users at risk this way.

Somebody made off with terabytes of data from Citrix, and one of the interesting tidbits from Citrix’s press release about the breach is speculation that the hackers used “password spraying,”

While not confirmed, the FBI has advised that the hackers likely used a tactic known as password spraying, a technique that exploits weak passwords. Once they gained a foothold with limited access, they worked to circumvent additional layers of security.

Traditional brute-force attacks attempt to gain unauthorized access to a single account by guessing the password. This can quickly result in the targeted account getting locked-out, as commonly used account-lockout policies allow for a limited number of failed attempts (typically three to five) during a set period of time. During a password-spray attack (also known as the “low-and-slow” method), the malicious actor attempts a single commonly used password (such as ‘Password1’ or ‘Summer2017’) against many accounts before moving on to attempt a second password, and so on. This technique allows the actor to remain undetected by avoiding rapid or frequent account lockouts.

Clever. With access to enough account usernames, somebody somewhere in an organization is likely to have practiced poor password hygiene.

Currently, manufacturers are doing a terrible job of protecting their users, full stop. While not getting full OS updates (or even point releases) is annoying at best, not getting security updates is unacceptable. It sends a message that can’t be ignored: it says that your phone manufacturer doesn’t care about your data. Your info isn’t important enough for them to protect.

Security updates aren’t huge like full OS updates or even point releases. They’re released monthly by Google, so they’re much smaller and easier to bake into the system—even for third-party manufacturers. Again, there’s no real excuse not to make this a priority.

Carriers also play a significant role in slowing down Android updates. All of these companies that are more than happy to take consumers’ money seem reticent to do beyond the bare minimum to make sure they’re protected on the devices and networks they choose.

As Duo Security notes, the result of this insanity is that “90 percent of Android devices were not on the latest security patch released 26 days prior.”

SplashData looked at the passwords of 5 million accounts that were leaked by various breaches in 2018, and found that many users are still using very simple, easy-to-guess passwords.

The top 10 most common passwords, for example, were:

123456

password

123456789

12345678

12345

111111

1234567

sunshine

qwerty

iloveyou

According to SplashData, 2018 is the fifth year in a row that “123456” and “password” were #1 and #2 respectively on their list of common passwords based on analysis of breaches in that year. SplashData offers sensible steps to better create and manage passwords,

1. Use passphrases of twelve characters or more with mixed types of characters.

2. Use a different password for each of your logins. That way, if a hacker gets access to one of your passwords, they will not be able to use it to access other sites.

As a sort of sequel to its highly successful HTTPS Everywhere campaign, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has initiated a STARTTLS Everywhere project to improve email security.

Unfortunately, this is likely to prove a bit more challenging than HTTPS Everywhere because of issues with STARTTLS,

Although many mailservers enable STARTTLS, most still do not validate certificates. Without certificate validation, an active attacker on the network can read and even modify emails sent through your supposedly “secure” connection. Since it’s not common practice to validate certificates, there’s often little incentive to present valid certificates in the first place. A brief experiment on Censys shows that about half of the mailservers that support STARTTLS use self-signed certificates.

. . .

When two mailservers support STARTTLS, their insecure connection is opportunistically upgraded to a secure one. In order to make that upgrade, the two mailservers ask each other if they support STARTTLS. Since this initial negotiation is unencrypted, network attackers can alter these messages to make it seem like neither server supports STARTTLS, causing any emails to be sent unencrypted. ISPs in the U.S. and abroad have been caught doing exactly this, and in 2014, several researchers found that encryption on outbound email from several countries were being regularly stripped.

But you have to start somewhere, and the EFF should be commended for going beyond simply issuing policy prescriptions and recommendations, and doing a lot of the heavy lifting to improve end user security.